Hooligans alive and thriving in league

Just another day at the office. The crowd violence, missile throwing and post-match incidents which accompanied last Saturday's Irish League meeting between Glentoran and Linfield at the Oval were mind-numbingly predictable and provided yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the league set-up here.

The administrators may talk in grandiose terms about change and formulating strategies for the future, but their empty words have all the impact of the little boy plugging his finger in the dyke while the floodwaters threaten to wash over the top of them.

The violence which permeates the Irish League has created a new breed of statistician. It is no longer enough to have the information about top goalscorer, fewest goals conceded or best away record at your fingertips; no self-respecting chronicler of the game here can survive without an encyclopaedic knowledge of the most recent violence either on or off the park, which teams were involved and who was fined or suspended.

In the last year alone, the history of meetings between Glentoran and Linfield includes an alleged assault on the Glentoran manager in the tunnel at Windsor Park (Linfield's home), an attack on the Linfield manager while he sat in the dug-out at the Oval (Glentoran's home), numerous missile throwing incidents, crowd trouble on the terraces and the small matter of an on-field fist-fight involving 20 players.

The response of the authorities has been mealy-mouthed and ineffectual. Linfield and Glentoran are the two big money-spinning clubs of the Irish League. Every other side relies on the income generated by their large travelling supports to survive. The league mandarins are unlikely to do anything which might contribute to that financial life-line being taken away. Linfield's last visit to the Oval, before Saturday, had ended in chaos with David Jeffrey the target of attacks launched by Glentoran supporters from the stand.

Imagine this happening in any other league or in any other sport anywhere in the world. A substantial fine would be the least a club would expect, and a lengthy ban would be a real possibility. Unsurprisingly, none of these followed those events late last year. Or after the litany of violence before or since.

The only response - and wait for this - was to move the Linfield dug-out at the Oval away from where the Glentoran fans traditionally sit to the other side of the ground in front of where the Linfield support stand. Laughable doesn't even begin to describe it.

Last Saturday's game - in front of around 10,000 supporters - began in typically rancorous fashion. Glentoran have been the best side in the league this season and were clear leaders at the start of play having gone unbeaten over the past three months. Linfield have been second best, but have just managed to stay in touch.

With 18 minutes to go the score stood at 1-1. While Linfield were making a substitution, their full back, Tommy McDonald, waited on the far side to take a free kick. His misfortune was to be within throwing distance of the Glentoran supporters. One fired a stone at McDonald which struck him on the head and he fell to the ground.

The game was delayed for three minutes while the head-wound was bandaged so the Linfield player could continue. The referee, Herbie Barr, chose to let the game go ahead even though many of his colleagues have been adopting a policy recently of taking players from the field if a missile is thrown or if the safety of the players and officials is threatened. The game duly wound its way to a poisonous climax and Linfield won with a late goal from Chris Morgan to keep the championship alive. By the end, the frustrations of the home support had boiled over. More missiles - mostly coins - rained down on the Linfield players as they made for the dressing-rooms. Trouble continued in the players' lounge, with a number of further incidents including an alleged assault on Morgan.

Being a successful Linfield or Glentoran player is clearly a perilous profession: Glentoran's David Rainey was subjected to a vicious late-night attack 10 days ago which left him with a broken nose and other facial injuries which could keep him out of football for the rest of the season.

The net result has been the creation of an endemic culture of violence. But it is, if anything, more sinister than the sectarian confrontations we have been conditioned to accept here, because there is no recognisably religious element to it. Linfield and Glentoran draw the vast majority of their respective supports from the Protestant communities, but the hatred and antipathy that runs between them is more vicious than that between any other two clubs. That includes the famed rivalry between Linfield and Cliftonville, a club whose fan-base is primarily Catholic.

Tommy McDonald, the player attacked last Saturday, is that rarest of things, a Belfast Catholic playing for Linfield. But his background was incidental in what happened at the Oval. He was the victim, not of sectarian strife or internecine rivalry, but of pure, uncomplicated hooliganism. The patterns that are manifesting themselves in modern Irish League football are those that were prevalent in the English game 25 years ago and reflect a local game whose development both on and off the park has been stymied and retarded by the malevolent forces that surround it.

Remarkably, the term "hooliganism" is seldom used in football circles here. Perhaps that is because to do so would be to give tacit recognition to the scale of the problem. But all the hallmarks that characterised the darkest days of the hooligan problem of the 1970s and early 1980s in England are present and correct in the Irish League of 1999: heavy police presences around the grounds, outbreaks of street-fighting between rival supporters, fenced segregation in the grounds, decrepit terraces and inadequate facilities, missile throwing, a total failure to clamp down on racist and sectarian banners and abuse. The list goes on.

There is even a degree of weariness in media circles. The prevailing attitude seems to be that once you've covered six, seven or eight of those outbreaks of violence, you have exhausted all the avenues of breast-beating and moral indignation and said pretty much all there is to be said.

In England, football limped through the 1980s until the twin wake-up calls of Heysel and Hillsborough changed the landscape forever. The old blueprints were ripped up and the game reinvented itself with a root and branch reform of all its structures. Is it going to take something as catastrophic as a Heysel or a Hillsborough before the same thing happens here? Don't hold your breath.